During reading we have to process the syntactic structure of the sentences in front of us. Thus, if we process sentences in two different languages, for example German and English, do we access and use the same syntactic information for both languages if the structures are similar? In this study we show that on the neural level sentences in the first and in the second language (L1 and L2) are p...

The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

Recent research in the area of Second Language Acquisition has proposed that bilinguals and L2 learners show syntactic indeterminacy when syntactic properties interface with other cognitive domains. Most of the research in this area has focused on the pragmatic use of syntactic properties while the investigation of compliance with a grammatical rule at syntax-related interfaces has not received...